The Trick of It All Is...

...turn your brain off. Stop thinking. Step away from your thoughts. Take a bite. Sometimes it seems like one of those game show competitions where the contestants have been toiling away for an hour perfecting their craft and must finally just step away for fear of disqualification. With all the concerns that can go into eating today to achieve a environmentally friendly diet can lead to some toil and perfecting.

To be honest, I wonder sometimes if being a farmer would not be the best life choice for me. I do enjoy something about the outdoors, and the exhaustion of a hard day's labor is uplifting. Of course, that this idea pops into my head each day before I eat something is likely not very helpful. I have to admit my diet is not to the point where I want to be yet. I have not completely removed animal protein or even red meat from my diet. I was raised eating family meals which were well balanced with carbohydrates, a few vegetable options, and a protein entree. The most important part of this I believe was that it was a family meal, and I learned how to cook quite well, even exceeding my parents interest in different ways of preparation, flavor profiles, along with textural and visual elements. Thus it was with these things in mind that I began to get into cooking for myself and choosing meals. I still indulge in far too much junk food and use college lifestyles as an excuse. Yet, more recently with an expanded knowledge of the risk factors in meat protein or the mercury scares with fish like tuna, I have started to think a bit before purchasing meat to prepare for meals at my apartment, even to point where I rarely purchase it anymore. I do enjoy a properly prepared piece of meat. It is an essential part of so much of Western cuisine, and I do not believe it should be vilified... only balanced with plant matter and substituted for most meals. Frankly it isn't essential to many Eastern cuisines, and the substitutes of beans or tofu or lentils provide intriguing amounts of alternatives for even complete proteins with rice. Thus a diet rich in these items with the occasional meat proteins would seem to serve me fairly well.

Yet...the environmental issue is the one that is truly grim. Because as it turns out, any meat that I am likely to get my hands on in the store-- whether or not it has been fed a lot of unnatural things (organic or not)-- has still released large amounts of green house gases. By eating organic we assume we can at least be putting natural things in our body and into the ground when we eat plants. We could hope that this would be a sustainable way of farming, but the issue is that when I go the supermarket, virtually none of the stuff there is truly sustainable because it is from so far away. How can I ensure local produce when I have no ties to local farming? When there is not a huge amount of local farming, especially for certain products that do not grow here? Reverting back to my love of cooking, I would love to be more versed in seasonal cooking, a term I admit is a bit silly to me because seasonal cooking used to be the only type of cooking. We used to only be able to cook what would grow, so in the winter if hearty squash was what was left that was used. The whole idea of jarring and canning our own food came from the need to have things for winter. I always used to enjoy black eyed peas and tomato preserves even on New Year's Day because the peas were dried and the preserves jarred in summer. Where has our knowledge of this gone? When we aren't growing and picking our own food and orange is there in February at the supermarket, it's hard to roll back expectations and begin to learn this lifestyle again. So eventually I've gotten very hungry and to avoid calling in something I go ahead and make what I could buy at the store. Even so, I did eat out with a friend last weekend, and I wasn't really thinking about what I had until after the meal, only of enjoy myself at dinner. So who knows how far those things traveled and what was fed to the animal I was fed? The trick of it all is...